We invite expressions of interest to join our three new Working Groups on the Annual Meeting, Neuroimaging Research Pipelines, and Education & Outreach. We anticipate each group will number approximately 5-10 colleagues, depending on interest to participate.
The Chair of each Working Group will lead their group meetings, and also join the SEA-SIG committee. This is likely to involve several hours of time commitment a month. We anticipate that for other group members, the time involvement will vary according to your availability and how you wish to contribute to the group.
If you would like to participate in a group, please contact ohbm.sea.sig@gmail.com, outlining:
- Which Working Group you would like to join
- Any thoughts on how you might like to contribute (it’s also ok if you don’t have a firm idea at this early stage, but just know you’d like to be involved)
- For Neuroimaging Research Pipelines and Education & Outreach, if you are interested in Chairing the group
The aims and anticipated outcomes of each group are as follows:
Annual Meeting
Chair: Sepideh Sadaghiani
- Assess environmental impact of the annual meeting, and monitor this annually
- Investigate options for more sustainable conference models for future OHBM meetings
- Investigate (un)sustainable conference centre practises, and how these could be addressed
- Provide recommendations to Council on how to create a more sustainable annual meeting beyond Covid, including annual reports on how the impact of the meeting is being reduced
- Collaborate with the Education & Outreach Working Group on educational activities during the annual meeting (symposia, socials, and special events)
Neuroimaging Research Pipelines
Chair: TBC
- Assess environmental impact of neuroimaging research pipelines, from hardware and data acquisition to analysis and publication
- Investigate how these impacts can be minimised and the routes to sustainable neuroimaging research
- Provide resources for neuroimagers to calculate the environmental impacts of their research, and alternative more sustainable pipelines
- Generate reports and publications outlining sustainable neuroimaging best practise
- Collaborate with the Education & Outreach Working Group, and the new OHBM Best Practises Committee, on raising the profile of sustainable neuroimaging best practise
Education & Outreach
Chair: TBC
- Use psychological data on how humans respond to communications about climate change and environmental issues to optimally guide the SIG’s own activities
- Communicate with external industry partners and institutions, to advocate for reducing environmental impacts of hardware and computing infrastructure
- Liaise with sister neuroscience societies, such as ‘SfN Climate Crisis’, to strengthen ties and share resources
- Utilise online platforms to showcase the work of the SIG and of the Annual Meeting and Neuroimaging Research Pipelines Working Groups
- Collaborate with the Annual Meeting Working Group on educational activities during the annual meeting (symposia, socials, special events)
- Collaborate with the Neuroimaging Research Pipelines Working Group on raising the profile of sustainable neuroimaging best practise
Annual Meeting:
It is great that there are national cooperation sessions – for instance last week in Germany in coop with the DGKN – integrated in congresses. This allows both to spread the community and to decrease travel .
In addition, the conference is so densely packed that parallel sessions can not any more be visited by people interested in many topics. On demand talks might be a solution and will also help to decrease travel effort and pollution. So the annual meeting might have a program going on live and another one for viewing on demand (with lower costs).
Training courses:
There should be more national training courses- those on the OHBM are with to many visitors and are therefore not interactive. Usually, the talks are even not fitting to each other. Better smaller corses with digital lectures and interactive training with experienced researchers.